Search This Blog

Watandost in Urdu, Turkish and Farsi means "friend of the nation or country". The blog contains news and views about Pakistan and broader South West Asia that are insightful but are often not part of the headlines. It also covers major debates in Muslim societies across the world.

An insurgency swells, but Pakistan focuses on India

PAKISTAN REELS from almost daily bombings, and its cities, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Peshawar, and Islamabad are cited in news reports as once were Ramadi, Najaf, Samarra, and Baghdad when Iraq was on the boil.

The Pakistani army is now engaged in the frontier tribal areas as never before, and its intelligence officers are admitting to an increasingly coordinated threat from the Taliban and Punjabi militants, both with links to Al Qaeda. Most worrying is the rise of Islamic militancy in the Punjabi heartland, showing that the growing insurgency cannot be limited to the Afghan frontier.

Americans have been telling the Pakistanis that the real threat came from this insurgency nexus, not from Pakistan’s traditional enemy, India, and that Pakistan should wake up to the danger. Yet the bulk of Pakistan’s armed forces are still focused on the Indian border.

After three Indo-Pakistani wars since the British partitioned the sub-continent in 1947, two of them over Kashmir, old fears of India run deep in the Pakistani psyche. So is distrust of America, which uses Pakistan and then discards it “like a used condom,’’ as bitter Pakistanis are wont to say. Pakistanis particularly remember how the United States simply walked away when the Russians were defeated in Afghanistan, leaving Pakistan with the chaos on its border.

Too many Pakistanis view the fight against Islamic militants and the battle for Afghanistan as America’s struggle - not really theirs. Elements in the Pakistani military and intelligence service have long tolerated the Taliban as an ace up the sleeve, and as a counter to Indian influence in Afghanistan.

But haven’t the provocations, the Mumbai hotel bombings, the attack on the Indian parliament, and the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul, come from the Pakistani side, and hasn’t India shown restraint? Yet, from Pakistan’s vantage point, every Indian consulate opened in Afghanistan is an encirclement, and every move has a hidden anti-Pakistani agenda.

Communal violence between Muslim and Hindu was the midwife to the birth of Pakistan, and there is a feeling that India has never really recognized the legitimacy of the homeland for Muslims that Pakistan was intended to be.

In 1971, when the Bengalis of East Pakistan sought to establish an independent country, it was an Indian invasion that accomplished the birth of Bangladesh. But, as Henry Kissinger discovered when he tried to prevent that war, it was the dismemberment of Pakistan that India really wanted.

No doubt the Pakistani military’s brutal behavior in east Bengal, and an intolerable flow of refugees into India were part of the drama. Millions were hemorrhaging out of East Pakistan. You could track their columns by the flocks of vultures overhead. But independence for Bangladesh was becoming inevitable. It did not need an Indian invasion.

India’s prime minister, Indira Gandhi, according to Kissinger’s memoirs, held the belief that “Pakistan was a jerry-built structure held together by its hatred for India. . .’’ Neither Baluchistan nor the Northwest Frontier properly belonged to Pakistan, she told Kissinger and President Nixon. They too wanted and deserved greater autonomy; they should never have been part of the original (partition) settlement and were among the “ congenital defects ’’of Pakistan. She implied that confining her demands to the secession of East Pakistan amounted to Indian restraint; that “the continued existence of West Pakistan reflected Indian forbearance, ’’ Kissinger wrote.

Times change, and serious Indians have little desire today to dismember Pakistan. Indeed, India’s greatest fear is shared by the United States: that Pakistan will disintegrate into chaos. But old fears die hard, and it isn’t likely that Pakistan is going to let down its guard to concentrate all its resources on the home-grown insurgents that are threatening the state.

Like so many of the world’s hot spots that have bedeviled the United States - Vietnam, Iraq, Israel-Palestine - the India-Pakistan conflict was spawned in the break-up of European colonial empires after World War II.

Pakistan is far more important than Afghanistan will ever be, and if the United States wants to see it remain a viable ally, nothing could help more than a concerted diplomatic effort to lessen the continuing tensions between Pakistan and India that so hinder efforts to contain Islamic militants.

H.D.S. Greenway’s column appears regularly in the Globe.

Get link

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Google+

Email

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Inside Story about Musharraf-Mahmood TussleHassan Abbas: September 24, 2006

General Pervez Musharraf’s memoir In the Line of Fire is expected to generate a lot of debate and discussion in the days to come. Except some western journalists and Musharraf’s close friends (three ghost writers) hardly anyone has had a chance yet to read the book from cover to cover. The excerpts of the book leaked through Indian media and General Musharraf’s statements to some American media outlets however have already created some controversies. In the United States, controversy is considered a positive thing, so the book is bound to become a bestseller here, but in Pakistan probably the opposite is true.

This article is not a review of the book (as I haven’t got hold of a copy yet), but it endeavors to throw some light on the widely reported Musharraf comment about the Armitage threat conveyed through Lieutenant General Mahmood Ahmed, the then Director General of the ISI. I had done research on this speci…

From Stalemate to Settlement: Lessons for Afghanistan from Historical Insurgencies That Have Been Resolved Through Negotiations
by Colin P. Clarke, Christopher Paul, RAND, 2014

In June 2013, the Afghan Taliban opened a political office in Qatar to facilitate peace talks with the U.S. and Afghan governments. Negotiations between the United States and the group that sheltered al-Qaeda would have been unthinkable 12 years ago, but the reality is that a negotiated settlement in Afghanistan is one of several possible end games under the current U.S. withdrawal plan. Negotiating an end to an insurgency can be a long and arduous process beset by false starts and continued violence, but a comprehensive review of historical cases that ended in settlement shows that these negotiations followed a similar path that can be generalized into a "master narrative." This research examines 13 historical cases of insurgencies that were resolved through negotiated settlement in which neither sid…

PESHAWAR: The sombre faces of senior police officers during Bannu DIG Abid Ali’s funeral were revealed how shaken NWFP Police are over the loss of a competent officer.

“We cannot believe it,” most police officers were heard saying when his coffin, wrapped in the national flag, was taken to the airport for its journey to his native city, Lahore. People at the funeral said that the police, as an institution, was losing its respect among people, but officers like Ali, earned it back with their hard and honest work. They said that letting his murderers go free would be an unforgivable act for the Riffat Pasha-led team. They believed that the assassins were professional killers.

The government had awarded Ali two Quaid-e-Azam Police Medals in recognition of his services to the police force, making him the only officer to earn the honour. The place where Ali was murdered is notorious for car thef…